My Favourite Things - the Pathology of Collecting

Started off looking at how objects are organized and categorized in a collection. A good video to watch to analyze how people choose to display there personal collections compare to an official collection (museum collection) is the pony room tour video below. It is interesting as a collections organization is purely how the collector chooses to display it and the collection is most likely to be only for the collectors eyes often hidden away within a room of there house. There are many different ways collections can be organized and displayed such as by shape, size, type and value, although how does someone determine the value of an object is it purely what someone is willing to pay or is it rarity of the object.

Moving onto looking at Freud’s View of the Human Mind: The Mental Iceberg

conscious (small): this is the part of the mind that holds what you’re aware of. You can verbalize about your conscious experience and you can think about it in a logical fashion.

preconscious (small-medium): this is ordinary memory. So although things here aren’t in the conscious, they can be readily brought into conscious.

unconscious (enormous): Freud felt that this part of the mind was not directly accessible to awareness. In part, he saw it as a dump box for urges, feelings and ideas that are tied to anxiety, conflict and pain. These feeling and thoughts have not disappeared and according to Freud, they are there, exerting influence on our actions and our conscious awareness.

This theory puts out the idea that people collect to forget and explains why we record what we want to remember. Meaning some collections maybe could be described as a form of escapism from your unconscious level which in Freud’s view is largest area in the Mental Iceberg which you cannot control.

What we have begun to suspect is that the collection is never

really initiated in order to completed. Might it not be that the

missing item in the collection is in fact an indispensable and

positive part of the whole, in so far as this lack is the basis of the

subject’s ability to grasp himself in objective terms? Whereas the

acquisition of the final item would in effect denote the death of

the subject, the absence of this final item still allows himself the

possibility of simulating his death by envisaging it in an object,

thereby warding off its menace.

The System of Collecting Jean Baudrillard

The Ceramic Galleries at the V&A London 1909 is a good example of an object graveyard as the objects are put behind glass never to be used again. The object is completely divested of its function and now only exists to be collected.